Part 4 of a 4 part interview with Winkie Pratney

Winkie Pratney

Winkie Pratney is a legend! He has been reaching young people for well over 40 years and is recognised as a worldwide leader in the church. At a recent summit of European leaders Jonathan Bellamy was privileged to spend a couple hours with him. Here's the results...

Jonathan: In another session you spoke on a type of science; a relatively new science called chaos mathematics and fractals. Briefly what does this mean? If it's possible to say it briefly and what does it say about how God wants us to live?

Winkie: One of the surprising things about God is that the Bible is not his only witness in the world. There's a lot of people who have never seen a Bible, probably never will, could never afford one or have it in their own language. There's another Bible and it's nature around you. He says if you look at nature you'll see what I'm like. It's like reverse engineering. What you're looking at to get an idea of who's the one who made this thing.

A great deal of work today in the Intelligent Design movement and others are looking at, even if you didn't believe in a God, somebody's making something of incredible complexity. The more we discover the universe outside or even the universe within. A single human cell is more busy than New York City and we thought it was like stew. This tiny little machine is smaller than DNA. Hundreds of different forms, that unwind things, carry stuff from place to place and they're little machines. Real little machines. Their organic but they're real machines. So we're all into you know nano particles, we can do this, that. They're already there. When we found them it freaked us out, like how did that get there. That's not soup, that's something! That's coherent. So looking at this whole question of chaos maths; it's actually two. It's quantum physics is the other one. Quantum physics is about a hundred years old. Chaos maths is about thirty years old. So within a person's lifetime, these are new sciences. Young people now in school are learning chaos maths; not much of it. It's only a recent discovery, but if we look at nature as a reflection of what God says he's like; we can't really see the deep world, the quantum world is too tiny and you have to sort of look at it as a whole; but the words we're using to describe the strangeness of the universe when you go right down to it's matrixes of what it is, become more like poetry. They take on strange names like strangeness, charms, quacks. It's almost like Narnia or something when you get down there - unpredictable; you can't say where something is. You can say where it isn't. It's not out here, it's not down there, but you can't actually say it's there. Like a movement of an electron around a hydrogen atom. You can't say where that is. You can say it's not there; it's in this particular quantum level. Fuzzy. It's a fuzzy universe.

Then if you look at nature around you, you're looking at what we thought was regulated by standard classical Newton mechanics: force laws, cause and effect. In trying to predict weather, they thought that if we can get powerful enough computers, this is how chaos was first discovered, as a system of maths; if we have powerful enough computers, and satellite links, and analyse what's going on in the earth's present conditions, we should be able to predict weather for years. They ran the numbers and it didn't work: not because the computers weren't powerful enough, they were really powerful ones. Nor because the data gathering was not that good. Because it was. But because the maths was wrong. So as they were running their numbers, they realised living dynamic things don't move in complex systems, like they do in classical mechanics.

See I think that Windows is such a huge programme that fractal things go on, chaotic things go on; that's why you can boot it up and it's perfect and you shut it down and boot it up again and it's something else. No Windows engineer knows Windows. No one person in the world. It's like the stock market, no one person knows it. Nature around us is like that. It is so huge and so complex and moving all the time. It shows us another face of God. If we only had classical Newtonian physics; and I mentioned Newton knew more about God than about physics. He's the man that invented calculus when he was twenty one, because he couldn't solve a problem; he had a good take on the macro world we live in, cause and effect relationships. But he never would have dreamed of the quantum world. He didn't know anything about the fractal world.

Artists know intuitively; you can never paint the same thing twice. That each thing's unique. When you look at the beauty of nature you're not looking at simple lines, simple circles like our little boxes and things we build. You're looking at these wigglies - these strange shapes that are actually finite shapes that have no end to them. When you explore them they are mind blowing. So backing off from all of that and just saying what is that doing for us now, if we only had a Newton world it would be a very safe world, but there would be no alternatives in it and it would be a very boring one. The world God gave us is not strictly that world at all. It has alternatives in it; it has real risks in it. In that world bad things can happen to good people and good things can happen to bad people. But he believes that is a better world and a more fun world to be in than the world in which nothing could go wrong. So I think we've been permitted at the end of two thousand years of physics, of looking at things, to actually begin to see some of the equations behind how he really made the world and it gives us another picture of God. He's not just a wind-up person. Deism came when people believed God wound up the world and walked out, but he's an active creative live person and all of the variety and the spontaneity is not simple randomness, or simple chaos in the old sense when there's no order in this at all. In chaos maths there's order in the disorder and disorder in the order. There is a boundary of unpredictability, which no one has ever heard of until this last thirty years.

Jonathan: People are very often afraid of change and that sense of fear of not knowing what's going to happen. Are you saying that God's saying that he actually wants us to embrace change and risk?

Winkiwe: It's scary, especially in Europe, but remember the scripture says that God has not given us a spirit of fear but love power and a sound mind. If you put a fear in people's life three consequences will happen. They will be afraid of people and there will be no trust and hence no love; it's a sapping of your energy. The lazy man - the Bible says - is as a lion out on the streets. I'm not going out. You don't become a risk taker anymore. There's no entrepreneurial vision or anything. In the last one sound mind; after a while you go crazy. You think your little world is the whole world, then you build your castle in the clouds and you move into it. So if the spirit of fear was taken out of anything like a demon or something, if the whole idea of fear was taken out, you do have a risk there. But risk is what makes life worth living. This new generation of kids, are risk takers. They would probably be fourteen more Dumb and Dumber movies and twenty seven Jackass movies; because kids do more and more crazy things because they are bored out of their skulls. So if safety was the only thing we should look for, then death is a good thing because you don't change except your body and stuff and you are stuck with whatever you've got for ever. But if the essence of life is growth, change, from the base of having some kind of stability in our lives, some security. It's not based on whether the swine flu is circulating or the economy is dropping. We have a sense of security in something bigger than our circumstances. We can then from that castle venture into risk. So part of my job is to give kids the castle and say your risk taking is not bad, it's built into you. You're designed for it. Just don't cross the boundaries and I'll share what the boundaries are. Push the edges but don't fall of the cliff and that's the heart of it.

Jonathan: Final question for you. People look at your life and see a lot of fruitfulness, effectiveness; you've been very influential. Yet you said that when you died a couple of years ago you felt a regret. Can you describe what that was and how this has affected the way you've lived since then?

Winkie: The first surprise in dying was there was no fear at all. I thought you might have a bit of fear like, well I'm dying, I'm dead, what's going to happen now? None at all: it was almost like you're dead, you're going to Africa now. Or here's a new suit, change into it. New - whole new thing, but not scary at all. That surprised me. I thought surely you should be a little scared or something.

The second one - the regret thing - was not specific. But it was the one emotion I really remember strongly. It was a tinge; it wasn't like aching, crying, beating the breast regret. It was like a twinge of regret; and not specific at all. My regret was like, it's a pity, that's probably the best word; it's a pity that I'm dead because there're some things I never finished that I would've liked to do. They weren't projects, they were just like, there are some things I wished I'd finished, I wished I'd done and I just missed it and I can't do it now, it's a pity. That was it.

Now I'm two years on and can get to start again. I'm actually seeing some of those things and seeing how important they really were. That meeting with Billy and the ministers. That was one of the greatest honours in my whole life; to be part of that little group of people. To hang out with him in his final years. He's still alive and the Lord willing and the creek doesn't rise. But we're finishing a new study Bible. It's been sitting on the shelf for ten years. That was something - I didn't think of that at the time; but now I go - if I had died that never would get done. It's being put together as we're talking now and it'll be here at the end of the year. Things like this visit. I wouldn't have been able to do. This is a wonderful visit. Being able to hang out with people all over Europe. Each one is doing exciting and wonderful things. I would have missed this.

The other thing - that perception shift - a lot of things that we think are really important at the time, I've just got to do this - I have to have these papers done. I said you'll never stand before God hear him say 'you never finished the dishes; why didn't you do the dishes'? There are things that don't really matter. We think - I have to get this car, I got to get this house, I've a new office, you know. We think these are really really important things, but they're not. You could die and be buried and somebody else be in your office, in you're house and the car could be a pile of junk when lightning hits it, you know. They're not really that important. I think old people understand that more than young people do, except our generation of young people are very community minded. That's where there are electronic communities. They're after a family, people that they can share things with, even how trivial it looks like. But they also really appreciate friendships. That's their big thing and that is a big thing with God too.

I've spoken in a lot of old people's homes too. That's the other side of the coin from the young. I've looked at faces of people that were quite world changers at one stage and see their real life there, frail, you know and dribbling. It's a scary thing to look at. My mother in law is 89 and my father in law is 94 this year. My mother in law has had some strokes and some Alzheimer's and stuff. But as her body decays - the real - she's like a six year old now, happy, full of life, talking about the Lord wherever she goes. So I'm looking at the outer shell decaying and the real inner person coming out. You can't buy that. You can't be artificially generated. So when you look at old people and you get to talk with them and you ask them what are your regrets, they'll say I wish I spent more time with my family, they're not here now. They are out doing wonderful things and changing the world, but I don't see them anymore. You know that thing. They understand friendship, relationship, and that's really what it means to know God. It's to have personal friendship with him, and that's what he asks us to do. I'm not only your God, I'm your father and I'm your friend. So that's what I give to kids. They've got friends, now they need to know what God's like. So I'm trying to just get in there and 'reparent' them. There's a wonderful scripture at the end of the old testament it's in these last days I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh. There are five categories of people who are most neglected in society - children, babies, they get killed all the time - thrown away - nations policies - only one child, anybody else dies. Then young people - they're always blamed, something goes wrong it's young peoples fault. Old men - give you a gold watch and hope you'll be dead in six months, you're finished here. Women are always being hurt and oppressed and blue collar workers - people who don't own things; they're just working - sorry we've been downsizing - it's the economy you know and you lose your job that you've had for forty years - when they said we will be your father we will take care of you from cradle to grave. Now it's replaced by downsizing, see. These are abandoned, most neglected people and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit is on precisely those five groups. In the last days I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh and your sons and your daughters, your young people, on the handmaidens - the women. The old men shall dreams dreams, the young men shall see visions, and on the servants will I pour out of my spirit.

So I believe it's like this. Looking towards the end of our age the culmination of all the screw-up's we've done since God gave us the present things. There comes a time when God can't really extend very wisely the time that we have. If we don't do well with the time we've got, adding more time is not going to change it. That's the second law of thermo dynamics. Time doesn't improve, it just gets worse. I think he said this, this is a generation that's going to be orphaned, nobody will care for them. I will pour out my spirit of adoption and they'll be my sons and my daughters and my servants and my handmaid and my old men and this whole adoption thing and what he's doing now is creating in human family, which he designed to be a family - real family. That's my job. It's simple but it's scary. It's free but it's expensive, because it costs you everything that you have. What we are looking at is a new race, which is what we're supposed to be. So I don't know if you've ever done this. You go out into the country, you look up at the stars and you feel strange; it might be homesickness and the hole - there's a lovely thing that CS Lewis said, 'if I find within myself a hunger that nothing in his world can satisfy the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world'.

Jonathan: Winkie Pratney, thank you very much it's been a privilege to talk to you.

Winkie: Thank you very much.